The Demography of East and Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 2000s. A Summary of Changes and a Statistical Assessment
I. Attané, M. Barbieri
With 2.1 billion inhabitants, the region of East and Southeast Asia is home to one-third of the global population, notably thanks to China, the world’s most populated country, which alone has 1.3 billion citizens. This chronicle provides an overview of the major sociodemographic and health trends in the region since the 1950s, along with a statistical assessment of the most reliable recent data on each country. It includes information on population size and structure, fertility and its intermediate variables, nuptiality, mortality and health, international migration, urbanization and access to education. The region is marked by the extremely rapid progress acheived in reducing mortality and controlling fertility over recent years. Life expectancy at birth has risen from 40 to 70 years since the early 1950s and, thanks to vigorous and sometimes interventionist family planning programmes in certain countries, fertility in the region as a whole is now below replacement level. These changes are raising new demographic challenges, the most immediate of which are population ageing, changing migration patterns and, in some countries, a sex-ratio imbalance resulting from massive use of sex-selective abortion.
From Causes to Consequences: A Critical History of Divorce as a Study Object and the Main Orientations of French Research
A. Lambert
The article presents a critical history of divorce as an object of sociological study and describes the main directions of current research in France on the subject. Sensitive to the political context in which it developed, the sociology of divorce was for many years influenced by ideological considerations, as evidenced by Durkheim’s opposition to the reintroduction of divorce by mutual consent. The sociological study of divorce came into its own with the reform of the Civil Code in the late 1960s; an interdisciplinary research team was formed under Jean Carbonnier to advance knowledge of divorce in France. At that stage, the main research focus was quantitative demography. In the 1980s, with divorce becoming commonplace in French society, along with consensual unions and separation without divorce, the sociology of the couple took a new theoretical, methodological and epistemological direction. Since then it has focused almost exclusively on life after divorce, leaving aside the question of the causes and processes of marital breakdown. A brief international comparison shows that the causal and statistical analysis of divorce is still very much on the agenda in other countries.
Long Term Trends in Marital Age Homogamy Patterns: Spain, 1922-2006
A. Esteve, C. Cortina, A. Cabre
This paper uses marriage registration statistics to carry out a long-term descriptive analysis of age homogamy patterns in Spain, from 1922 to 2006. We first examine the relationships between marital age homogamy patterns, trends in second order marriages and age at marriage of men and women. Second, we apply a standardization method to decompose the changes of age homogamy among first marriages into the effects produced by changes in age-sex composition and those produced by the underlying age preferences of spouses. Results show that age homogamy increased during the 20th century, particularly in the last 30 years, while traditional marriages, in which the husband is older than the wife, are becoming less common. Although the analysis proves that under dramatic historical circumstances, changes in the age-sex composition of eligible partners modified age-assortative mating patterns, major responsibility of such patterns is to be found in behavioral factors. Official Statistics on Religion: Protestant Under-Reporting in Nineteenth-Century French Censuses
C. Dargent
As illustrated by the example of the French Protestants, the religious statistics produced by the four censuses held in France from 1851 to 1872 must be taken with great caution. Curiously, in 1851, the distribution of religious denominations by département was not published, due to unspecified "considerations of a particular nature". The question on religion was then removed from the 1856 census before reappearing in 1861, the census administrators noting with satisfaction that the "quite severe" difficulties encountered in 1851 had by that time disappeared. The stability of the Reformed population count as published, the differences between the enumeration of the urban Protestant population in 1851 and the figures given by local sources, its rapid growth over the subsequent period and the fact that the Reformed population numbers published for this census correspond precisely to the minimum required to justify the number of pastors remunerated by the state under the Concordat suggest that Protestant numbers may have been substantially under-reported. The state may have adjusted the number obtained in 1851 to stave off the threat of politico-religious problems. Under-reporting then decreased from 1861, with a delay of several years in Paris.
